"Red" Velvet Cupcakes and Homemade Pizza

I'd never heard of Red Velvet Cupcakes until I started baking and reading baking blogs and websites and stuff. Apparently they are a big deal in the American South. They sounded interesting, basically chocolate cupcakes dyed bright red. So I thought I'd give them a try. I found one of Allrecipes' top rated recipes to try.

4 tbsp cocoa
2 ounces of red food colouring (I have no idea how much this is, so I just dumped in everything I had)
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup oil
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vinegar

Preheat oven to 350. Prepare muffin cups. Make a paste of the food colouring and cocoa. Combine buttermilk, salt and vanilla. Set aside. In another bowl mix together oil and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time. Stir in cocoa mixture. Beat in the buttermilk mixture alternately with flour until just incorporated. Then mix together the baking soda and vinegar and gently fold into the batter. Spoon into muffin cups and bake 20 min or so.

Okay, well I should have known this recipe was going to turn out weird when I read that one of the steps involved recreating everyone's favourite first grade science experiment. I also didn't have near enough food colouring to use so they turned out as kind of brown-y, pink-y velvet cupcakes. But they were pretty tasty! Although one of my friends told me I was not allowed to call them Red Velvet Cupcakes, so we just started calling them The Special Surprise Cupcakes.

Then some friends and I made pizza for dinner.

Homemade Pizza

1 cup warm water
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
2 3/4 cups flour
1 1/4 tsp yeast

Add ingredients to bread machine in listed order. Set to 'Dough' Press start... wait 2 hours, you have pizza dough. Roll out onto greased pizza pan. Top with pizza sauce and your favourite toppings. Very tasty.